Dick Cheney, vice president during the George W. Bush presidency and secretary of defense for George H. W. Bush before that, died November 3 at the age of 84, due to complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Though Cheney was not a Texan, his ties to the state included heading then-Houston-based global oil field services company Halliburton in the late nineties, during which time he called Dallas home.
In early 2006, while on a quail-hunting trip in South Texas, Cheney inadvertently shot Harry Whittington with a 28-gauge shotgun, nonfatally peppering the 78-year-old Austin attorney’s face, neck, and chest with lead pellets. The incident made headlines across the world and proved infamous enough to earn the vice president a spot on the cover of the January 2007 issue of Texas Monthly, as the magazine’s Bum Steer of the Year.
Evan Smith, senior adviser at Emerson Collective and cofounder of The Texas Tribune, was editor in chief at the time. He recalls how one of our most memorable covers came to be. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
After hearing the news about Dick Cheney, the first thing I thought about was that cover.
If you’re lucky enough to be the editor of a great magazine, you think back to the three or four moments when you feel like you did your best work. Or you were part of the magazine’s best work being done—because nothing gets done by itself. It takes a team of people. I will always believe that the execution of that cover, from the germination of the idea all the way through the cover appearing out in the world, is one of the absolute high points of all the years that I was at Texas Monthly.
There are no new ideas, and there are especially no new magazine-cover ideas. There are only artful and creative twists on old ideas. I mean, I guess it’s possible, technically, that there’s a new idea out there, but often what people in the position of running a magazine’s editorial team or creative team do is they riff on iconic and successful old ideas. The Esquire cover where you have Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian with the arrows in his chest. Or the old cover of Richard Nixon with makeup being applied. Or the one with John F. Kennedy—the photograph of Kennedy with a hand wiping a tear from his eye. The Demi Moore pregnancy cover at Vanity Fair. The Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover with hands on her breasts, right? The iconic magazine covers of our lifetime.
Well, what if the person with arrows isn’t Muhammad Ali but somebody else? What if the person getting made up is not Richard Nixon but somebody else? What if the pregnant person whose belly is the sum total of the cover, basically, is not Demi Moore but somebody else? The one that was, for me, the iconic cover of all iconic covers was that National Lampoon cover—”If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” And I spent years in conversation with multiple art directors, looking for the opportunity for us to do a spin, a take—our own take—on that cover. And I’m telling you, we tried and failed—in the idea stage, in the conversations around numerous issues—to come up with a way to do that. We tried and failed repeatedly. And I gave up.
But when you least expect it, something happens. I was in the kitchen of my house, watching the small television in the cabinet, making food in the middle of a February day in 2006. And I saw the news that Dick Cheney had accidentally shot Harry Whittington in the face while in Texas. And in that moment—didn’t take five minutes, didn’t take five weeks—in that moment, I thought, “Oh my God, the day has finally come.” That’s when it happened. I knew in that very moment that the next Bum Steers cover would be “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, Dick Cheney Will Shoot You in the Face.” I knew it. I knew it months, almost a year in advance of publication. I knew it.
Now here’s the problem with that. Not everybody at Texas Monthly knew that old National Lampoon cover. I had to sell the idea to people there. Folks had to understand why it was funny, why it was iconic, what the reaction to it would be. And so, there was a process—fortunately, it didn’t take terribly long—of having to educate the people on staff, because some of those people were too young. Some just weren’t aware of it even if they were old enough. But very quickly, everybody got on board.
At that point, it’s about execution. You have to get it right. You have to figure out exactly: Well, if it’s not going to be the exact same cover, what’s it going to look like, so that it will at least be referential? Choice of typeface, placement of type—those were very important things. Obviously, the image wasn’t Dick Cheney; it was Dick Cheney’s head on somebody else’s body. We had to get that exactly right. We had to be sure we had the gun exactly right. Not the same gun from the National Lampoon cover, but the gun from the incident, or at least a gun that was similar to the gun from the incident. T. J. Tucker was the art director. He was brilliant. It was his idea to pepper the Texas Monthly logo with buckshot, which I thought was an absolutely genius chef’s kiss touch.
Our lawyer at the time, David Anderson, saw the initial draft of the cover and said, “You are at risk legally if you are leading people to believe that this is actually Dick Cheney.” So, if you read the caption on the cover—ordinarily, there would not have been a caption on the cover, and had it not been for Dave Anderson, there would not have been a caption on that cover—that caption was a response to our lawyer telling us, “If somebody mistakes that for Dick Cheney—if you don’t actually say this is not Dick Cheney—you’re potentially putting yourself at some risk.” So the caption makes a joke of that while accomplishing what we needed to accomplish with the lawyers. [“*Yes, this is a photo illustration. If we don’t say so, Dick Cheney will shoot us in the face.”]
We thought it was hilarious. And then we hoped that everybody else would think it was hilarious. And, you know, we did a pretty good job on it, I think.
It was immediately a big hit among the people who read Texas Monthly. And it got a lot of attention in circles where people maybe didn’t necessarily see every issue—or even any issue of Texas Monthly. “New York” loved it. The magazine business loved it. We heard from people up there: “Oh my God, what a great cover.” And we didn’t always hear that, even though we had a lot of great covers. But this one really broke through. It penetrated.
Ultimately, Time named it the best magazine cover of the year. We won acknowledgement from the American Society of Magazine Editors, who recognized it for the best cover line of the year. I mean, in some ways, it was obvious, but we just pulled it off. An obvious idea can be a great idea if you execute it properly.
There were many times at Texas Monthly when somebody—I as editor, or somebody else on the team—had an idea, and we thought, “We could never do that.” And then we didn’t do it. And after the fact, we might have thought we could have done it. There was one time when I said, “You know what we ought to do? We ought to put Kinky Friedman in a dress, dressed like the Queen of England, flipping off the readers of the magazine.” That one we actually did do, and we shouldn’t have. I wish somebody had talked us out of that one.
This was a case when what seemed like a good idea was embraced, we worked really hard to make it happen, and it turned out better than we could have expected. And the magazine will always be known—and those of us associated with it will always be known, to some degree—for it. First paragraph of the obituary, right?
Never heard a word about it from Cheney. I will say, though, that I worried. I didn’t worry so much then, but I worried much later. In 2022 I was able, after a lot of effort, to get Liz Cheney to agree to close the Texas Tribune Festival. And she agreed relatively late. It was probably a month out from the festival that we announced it. I spent the next four weeks sleepless, effectively worried that Liz would do a Google search and the first thing that would come up would be that cover, and she would call and say, “Yeah, I’m not coming.” But it never happened. Either she didn’t see it, or she did see it and had a sense of humor. In any case, I never got a reaction from anybody in the Cheney family.
I used to occasionally see Harry Whittington walking down Congress Avenue—much later, well after the fact. I would be walking south, down the street from the Tribune‘s offices, on Congress Avenue, and Harry Whittington would be walking up the street. And in my mind, I told myself that in the old days Harry Whittington would smile, but now when Harry saw me, he did not smile. I think I convinced myself that he had an issue with us as a consequence of that cover, but I’ll never know.
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